Widespread ownership of high quality printers has dramatically changed the office landscape. One aspect of today's printers that enables so many businesses and individuals to own and operate a high quality printer is the ease of replacing the ink supply or the ink printhead. Even large format printers used by graphics professionals and larger businesses permit the end-user to replace the ink supply or printhead.
Conventional techniques for constructing ink printheads for large format printing are well known. The ink printheads can be formed as a top shooter or a side shooter and are capable of operating in different piezoelectric print modes, such as a push mode or a shear mode. Most conventional printhead manufacturing techniques include forming a silicon core from a silicon wafer polished on both sides and then etching a pattern of nozzles and associated firing chambers onto each side of the silicon core. In one technique, the etching is accomplished via a deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) process, which limits design flexibility along the Z dimension (e.g. height). These conventional processes are quite time consuming and require many iterations of coating, exposing, and developing to achieve the final structure of nozzles and firing chambers on the silicon core. In addition, conventional printheads used for large format printers typically include layers made of dissimilar materials, which causes a mismatch in the coefficient of thermal expansion between the silicon core and the other materials bonded to the silicon core.
Because of the continuing strong demand for printheads, printer manufacturers are driven to achieve faster and better processes for manufacturing printheads.